I love writing. I revere the use of language as an instrument for seeking the truth about life. My books are downloadable and the paperback editions will be appearing soon. Click on the links at the right side of this page. Peruse this blog, it's loaded with music, photography and writing. Hey, sign up for my email list!

Monday, June 30, 2014

I estimate that
each of my legs weighs sixty pounds.
That leaves a hundred pounds for the rest of my body. My head probably weights twenty, which
leaves eighty for the arms and torso.
My belly, that piece of me that surprised me totally when it arrived in
the years between forty and forty five, my belly must take up sixty pounds of
that remaining eighty. It's a classic
middle-aged man's belly. It is
true, I eat too much and most of that eating is in bed. Every night of my entire life I have munched
or crunched something as I read myself to sleep.

My theory is that I am
seeking a substitute for breast milk.
My early days on this planet were not a paradise of blissful bonding
between my mother and child. My father tells
me that I had night terrors. I tell him
that if I was terrified of anything, it was my mother.

During my futile attempts to rid
myself of this belly I’ve done ten kinds of abdominal exercises, hundreds of
reps daily, for months and months on end.
My belly didn’t get smaller. It
got bigger.

Why was I
exercising my six-pack this way? What
myth did I buy into? If I wanted to get
rid of my belly, I should have done absolutely nothing. I should have, with the wisdom of hindsight, accepted the fact that this belly is here to stay, it's a natural by
product of aging. It just IS, and why
is that so horrible? Why is everyone
buying gizmos, electronic abdominal muscle stimulators? Why do they buy
gimmicks with names like Abbacizers, Sixpackalongs, Abhancers? Why do people
hang from bars and pull themselves up and back, up and back, or lay tilted on
long boards, going up and back, up and back?
There’s more than a little insanity in this vain pursuit. The obsession with the six pack is about
vanity and its monster shadow, insecurity.
Our culture pumps its toxic load of media venom into our collective
psychic bloodstream so that we feel inadequate if our bodies don’t adhere to
some contemporary ideal of beauty. For
the moment, that ideal has become horrifically thin; it forms the ironic
counterpoint to the visible reality that Americans have gotten chronically fat.

We’re a culture with a lot of
food. I mean, a lot lot lot of
food. There’s never been a civilization
in the history of the world with more food.
It’s hardly surprising that everyone eats a lot, gets fat and the ideal
of beauty is to have arms and legs so thin that you have to walk around storm
drains lest you slip through the bars and get washed out to sea.

I wish we could weigh thoughts just
as we weigh butter, or scrap metal. How much would my daily output of
body-shame weigh? How many pounds,
kilos, ounces, grams would every thought weigh, those thoughts that go, “Oh I
wish this belly would flatten out, it makes me feel so unattractive, so
grotesque?”

People who are at war with their
bodies spend money on ridiculous products. Teeth whiteners! When did this obsession come along? Who cares about teeth whiteners? People who use them look ridiculous. There’s a blinding beam of Cheshire Cat grin
every time they open their mouths, a light so blatantly artificial that it
obscures the rest of the face with its message: “I am insecure and hopelessly vain. I use teeth whiteners.”

This is how to create a market for a
useless product. People will start
fixating on their fatigue-shadows, examining the mirror for any hint of
darkening skin. The stuff will sell
like crazy, as another reason to hate one’s body darkens the horizon of the
national psyche. This insanity is all
about money. People who hate themselves
spend more money, spend compulsively, to cover their unhappiness. It serves the interests of marketers to
create a social condition in which self hatred becomes the paradigm.

I have to ask myself the question,
“Which is worse, being overweight, or being guilty, stressed and ashamed of
being overweight?” Which damages my
health more? I think it’s the
latter. I think that stressing and
hating my body is more toxic than glugging down three milkshakes a day.

How many ridiculous weight-loss products
bloat the bandwidth of the media empires?
How many bogus concoctions feed on the fervent wish that one can lose
pounds and become shapely without any effort?

I have invented my own product to
add to this glut for gluttons: “Thindreme”ä! Here’s the commercial, presented by a
blandly attractive blonde woman in front of a red- white- blue studio set
enhanced by computer graphics showing fat bodies and thin bodies arranged for
before/after comparison.

“Do you dream of going to sleep fat
and waking up thin? Now your dreams can come true! Two tablets of clinically proven Thindreme before bed will melt
the pounds away as you sleep! The more
you sleep the thinner you will get.
This new miracle compound acts upon the metabolism of your slumbering
body and converts fat cells using the principle of DCE, or Dynamic Caloric
Extrapolation. It is a proven fact that
Rapid Eye Movement sleep is an untapped source of caloric output. In other words, REM sleep is exercise! Thindreme has come along to utilize this remarkable
opportunity. The more you dream, the
more weight you lose! Within four to
six weeks you can emerge a brand new person, thin, sexy, appealing, without any
effort on your part! Forget about diet, exercise, lifestyle. You don’t need will power. Thindreme does it for you! Now you can be the man or woman of your
dreams! If you order in the next ten minutes, Thindreme will double your order,
and at no extra cost, will give you this free nose hair trimmer. And there’s
more! We will also add to your order
this stylish miniature folding piano! So pick up the phone, and order now! And
remember, Thindreme is Clinically Proven.” *

I’ve given up trying to rid myself
of this belly. I know that a group of
cannibals would find me delicious. My
bicycle thighs would be a Kentucky Fried delight, the most giant Crispy ever to
appear in a cannibal’s bucket.

When I compare my life to the living
hell in which I see that most people exist, I feel grateful for the good life
that I have. My relationship with my
partner has its sick elements, to be sure, its ‘enablings’ and ‘codependencies’
(how I love this modern language of the heart’s twisted pathways). We don’t fight. If something starts to fester between us, it will come out in a
talk, a gentle but firm confrontation where our fears are expressed and laid to
rest.

This was supposed to be about my
belly, but I can’t write about that part of my personal real estate without
including all kinds of other things in my life. My belly doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it isn’t just floating around
in space, a belly, without connection to the rest of the universe. My belly may
be causing storms on Neptune, for as we have recently discovered, everything
has a connection to everything else.
It’s the Butterfly Effect. Or in
this case, The Belly Effect.

My belly is a dominating presence in
my life. I, who spent my youth being
thin and sinewy, looking like a Hindu holy man from the hippie trail in Nepal,
am now somewhat imprisoned by this entity who sits astride the center of my
body. It goes everywhere with me. My vanity is not the main actor in this dismay. My vanity went out about the same time as my
hair. Well, that’s not exactly
true. I am concerned with how I appear
to other people. The problem is, I know
that the one person least qualified to judge how I appear to other people is
myself. And that is a universal
law. You, who think you look thus and
thus to the outside world, are completely deluded. When you look in the mirror, the information you receive is so
utterly tainted by your needs and dreams that you might as well be looking at a
stranger. I wish people would
understand this.

YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE. YOU NEVER WILL.

There are so many ingredients that
go into an appearance that are invisible to the owner of a human body, that
said owner should just give up. Photographs lie for many reasons. Photos capture one two hundredth of a
second, and in that two hundredth of a second, an expression may be crossing
your face that is otherwise invisible, so quickly do the facial muscles change
with the passing of emotion. That’s why
we often look odd in pictures.
Videotape is in some ways even worse.
I don’t know a single soul who doesn’t cringe when viewing his or
herself on video. Its distortions are
insidious but nonetheless real.

I say this to my fellow humans: do your best to be hygienic, wear clothes
that are comfortable and that please you, and let your nature emerge, because
that’s what happens anyway. Your
appearance is determined by your nature.
The way you look is about energy, not physical features.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Confessions Of An Honest Man

All
characters in this book are either fictional or in the public domain

Chapter
One

September,
1967. Detroit, Michigan

Aaron
Kantro follows his colleagues through the labyrinth of the nightclub's kitchen
and out the back door. A waft of cool
air hits his face as he steps onto the concrete platform next to the loading
dock. His sweat instantly begins to dry and he can see steam misting from the
other musicians' tuxedos. It's the
band's third break. They will play one
more set of forty five minutes. Then
their work for the night is done.

There
are nine or ten people gathered around the rear entrance to the club. They are either jazz fans who want to hang
out or they are so loaded they don't know how they got there.

A
man with his shirtails dangling from his suit stumbles into Aaron. "I wan' shake your hand," he
announces. He extends his unkempt
digits and then pulls his hand away as if to recalibrate his arm's
trajectory. Aaron, when he puts his
hand out to respond, feels like an idiot.
He puts his hands in his pockets and hopes the man will go away.

"I
tell you somethin'", the man says.
"You play some drums for a white boy. Some fuckin' drums. I
close my eyes, can't tell the diff'rence.
Sound jus' like a real drummer."
He tries again to extend his hand and stumbles across his own feet.

"Excuse
me", a young lady says as she passes between Aaron and the drunk. She wants an autograph from the legendary
saxophonist, Zoot Prestige. Aaron's
boss transfers a cheroot from his hand to his mouth. He leans down to inscribe his signature into the lady's little
book, while trying to keep his eyes averted from the cleavage that is so
conspicuously thrust into his face.
Aaron notes this little drama and loses his anger. Zoot Prestige is just too funny. Aaron
quietly moves behind the imposing figure of his boss. The drunk rambles away, talking to himself.

Aaron
is the only white person beneath the scalloped awning. There are perhaps ten white people in the
club. It bothers him more than he
likes to admit that he longs to see other white faces. It has been his decision to play jazz, and
his brand of jazz carries him to black clubs in black neighborhoods. Sometimes, the moment he walks into a place,
he feels the air freeze with racial tension.
Sometimes he is scared. The only
way through it is to play the music.

As
the little throng disperses, Zoot butts his smoke in the sand of an
ashtray. He steps off the concrete pad
and walks across the lot towards his car.

After
waiting about thirty seconds, the group's organist, Tyrone Terry, follows the
lanky figure of his boss. Aaron waits
another thirty seconds and follows his colleagues to the cream-colored
Continental. This precaution seems a
little silly but there are probably narcs in the club and Aaron has to admit
that it is pretty obvious what's happening when three jazz musicians get into a
car and don't go anywhere.

Soon
the men are engrossed in the ritual of the pipe: lighting, inhaling, holding
breath, exhaling. It's cozy in the
Continental’s plush interior. Air comes
sighing through the upholstery’s leather seams as the musicians' weight
compresses the seat cushions. Zoot and
his side-men are settling down, recharging their nerves for the next set, the
last set. It is one o’clock in the
morning.

BANG! There is a huge sound, an explosion. The men's bodies react instinctively. They duck, and their arms rise to cover their heads.

The car lurches as a man dives
across the hood, holding a pistol in his right hand. His legs swim wildly as he fights to stop his momentum. Whatever tactic he has in mind, it isn’t
working. The car’s sheen and finish
turn the hood into a sliding board.

"Jesus fucking Christ!” In the back seat Aaron curses loudly without
thinking. He has never before heard a
gun shot. In spite of this fact, he
recognizes the sound. It is rounder,
weightier, and more final than the sound of a firecracker.

The man on the car's hood waves the
pistol frantically. Slithering to get
his balance, he clutches at the windshield wipers and misses. Gravity and car wax slide him across the
polished metal until he lands on the ground.
The pistol fires as he hits the gravel.
The bullet penetrates a tire with a loud hiss.

The man springs up and disappears
among the ordered rows of vehicles in the parking lot.

Zoot Prestige holds a finger to his
mouth, slides from under the steering wheel and drops quietly to the floor of
the passenger seat. Zoot doesn't want
to get shot. Zoot doesn’t want to be a
witness if somebody gets shot. Zoot doesn’t
want questions. Zoot doesn’t want any
dealings with the Poe-Leece!

Aaron scrunches onto the floor of the
back seat until his arm rests on the hump of the drive shaft. Tyrone, on the other side, is hoping to
disappear via the flawed logic of an ostrich.
He is pulling his little pork-pie hat over his eyes.

A voice shouts, "I'LL KILL YOU
MOTHERFUCKER!”

Two more shots are fired from the
opposite corner of the lot. Two
sparking ovals of muzzle flash light up the windshields of Cadillacs and Thunderbirds. A man’s face appears, pressed to the window
of Zoot’s car. His cheek is distorted
against the glass, with an eye like a panicked horse. His quick breath steams the window only inches from Zoot's
face. With a slight turn to the right,
Zoot becomes a virtual nose-to-nose mirror image of the man with the gun.

The enraged shooter doesn’t see the
human being an inch from his face. He
raises his snubby revolver over the top of the vehicle, fires twice without
aiming, and runs to cover behind a black Eldorado. The wind has changed. The
shots are barely audible.

"Sheee-it!” Zoot grumbles, “I
hope nobody messes up my short. I paid
three hundred bucks for this custom paint job.” The immaculately polished car is long and sleek as a submarine.

A voice shouts, "HEY LOOK HE'S
OVER THERE!"

Bang bang bang! Flashes light up the
musicians’ faces. Guns are all over the
place. Aaron looks at Tyrone. The keyboard player has twitched and spilled
a pipe full of burning marijuana into his lap.
He brushes and pats frantically to prevent embers from smoldering
through the pants of his tux. Thrusting
his hands into his pockets he makes a basket to prevent sparks from spreading
onto the seat or the carpet. Aaron produces a handkerchief and helps contain
the disaster. Tyrone is feeling little
stings of fire burning their way into his palms. He is tossing the embers back and forth as he jumps and wriggles
all over the tiny floor space behind the driver’s seat. When the young musicians’ eyes meet they
realize that they have entered the realm of the completely absurd.

They begin to giggle, as quietly as
possible. Tyrone manages to empty his
lungs without breaking into a hacking cough.
The bodies of both men are convulsed with terrified hilarity.

Aaron's legs are crossed on the floor
of the back seat. Zoot gestures with
his fingers for the pipe. Tyrone hands
it to Aaron as he muffles his cough and puts out the fire in his lap. Aaron gives the pipe to Zoot through the
space between the seats.

The parking lot is a bedlam of
running, screaming people.

Two men, fingers snarled in each
other’s sport coats, roll across the hood of Zoot’s car. The metal on the Continental goes‘scroich!
bunk!’. Zoot winces and hides his face
behind his hands. The men vanish
somewhere in the gravel of the lot, grunting and cursing. A grey fedora with a black band lays on the
hood for a moment before a stiff breeze carries it away. Zoot elevates his head a few inches and
tries to inspect his hood for damage.
It's impossible. The windows are
now opaque with steam.

Zoot relaxes. He sits with his face level with the knobs
on the dashboard. His wrists are on his
knees and his hands hang loose in the shadow beneath the glove box. He loads the pipe and hands it to Aaron through
the crack.

“Don’t strike no match!” he says. “Use that thing.” He points to the black knob of the cigarette lighter. Each door has an ashtray and each ashtray
has its own lighter.

Zoot sniffs the air inside the
car. “I smell somethin’ burning,” he
says. “You cats makin’ barbecue back
there?” His voice is good natured and
mocking.

Observing Zoot's total poise, Aaron
and Tyrone hiss through their lips with suppressed giggles. It is impossible to tell which part of the
moment is funny and which part is terrifying.
The giggles and spluttering have equal components of panic and the
hysterical disbelief of pot heads in a bizarre situation.

Big cars roar to life and race from
the lot in clouds of gravel and fumes.
Sirens doppler past, right on their tails, red lights whizzing through
the intersection. Crimson slashes of
reflection light up the Continental’s glass.

Then there is silence. People stealthily emerge from cover,
crunch-crunching across the gravel.
They run for shelter inside the club.
The musicians straighten their bodies with the slowness of clock hands
moving. Soon they are sitting normally
on the seats. Zoot loads the pipe,
lights and inhales. He holds his breath
for a long time, then exhales an almost transparent cloud. He replaces the pipe in a leather pouch,
conceals the stash under the seat, and twists his head from left to right and
back again, loosening his neck muscles.
He is sixty-two, and a tenor saxophone has hung from his shoulders for
more than fifty years.

"Should we go back in and
play?" There is a squeak in
Aaron's voice. He makes a few mock
rolls with invisible drumsticks.

Zoot looks at Aaron with a bare vapor
of a smile, tolerant of his drummer’s naïveté.
"Why wouldl we NOT
go back in and play?" The marquee
lights of the street's clubs and bars glow on half of Zoot's face, shadowing
the other half. This gives his eye a
demonic glitter. He wets his thumb and
forefinger with his tongue and smoothes the hairs of his moustache.

"Let me point out something to
you, babe,” says Zoot. “We're
professional jazz musicians. We play
music, and we get paid. Rather nicely,
I might add, thanks to my modest fame and the fact that I placed at number
eight in Downbeat’s Tenor Saxophone category." He pauses for a moment and says with a trace of gloating, “AHEAD
of Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz and Gene Ammons.”
He laughs a ripe and disdainful laugh.
The magazine polls have such appalling power to determine a musician’s
pay level.

Opening the door, Zoot brushes a tiny
flake of ash from his tuxedo pants with a dapper gesture, and corkscrews his
six foot three inch frame upright. The
saxophonist makes a quick but careful scrutiny of his vehicle. He circles it, running the flat of his hand
along its sculpted façade. There are no bullet holes that he detects, no
scratches. The hood has resumed its
normal shape.

Tyrone and Aaron squeeze themselves
out of the car. Aaron closes the door
delicately, with the barest of clicks, as if he fears the automobile will fall
to pieces if he so much as breathes wrong.

The world flickers. The young
musicians’ hearts race, their nerves tingle.
They are playing a jazz gig with a famous saxophone player! Zoot Prestige has apprenticed with Duke
Ellington, he’s played with Charlie Parker.
He is a legend.

Zoot straightens his lapels and moves
his shoulders inside his jacket so the garment settles more squarely on his
body.

"That's
right,” he adds. “We're hipsters, babe,
we stay cool. We got a paying gig, we
play until the club owner asks us to stop or it’s two a.m." Zoot's voice is like velvet and sand,
Scotch whisky and smoke. “Long as the drummer doesn’t get shot. Gotta draw the line somewhere. Last drummer I lost was Bobby Beffords, in
’65. And before that I had a good run,
only lost two drummers in six years.
Course, I never had a white drummer before. Everybody upset about that.”

He aims a gentle look at Aaron, to
check that he isn’t being taken seriously.
His smile is full of irony and play.
He brushes a bit of ash from Aaron’s tuxedo jacket. It is a tender paternal gesture.

Fourteen drummers had come to audition
when Zoot was putting together the band for this tour. Thirteen of them were black. Aaron was the third drummer to play. As soon as he finished the tune, Zoot sent
the other drummers home.

He knew he would take a lot of heat
for hiring a white drummer. Fuck
‘em. The kid was worth it.

“Ain’t nothin’ unusual happening
here, babe”, says Zoot. “It’s just
another gig, somebody’s old lady got too friendly with somebody else’s old man
and things got ugly.” The tall man
shepherds his young friends toward the door of the nightclub. “It’s human nature. Why don’t we go inside and play some music
to soothe the savage breast? We’ll lay
down some Recalcitrant Funk-itis."

Zoot has just coined another of his
classic nonsense terms. Recalcitrant
Funk-itis now joins the lexicon along with Groove-matic Ubiquity, Heliocentric
Hot Sauce and other such crazy combinations from Zoot’s fertile mind.

Tyrone pulls at his cummberbund to
conceal the holes in the crotch of his pants.
The young men follow the urbane figure of their mentor back into the
humid noise of Mickey Tucker's Jazz Corner.

Chapter
Two

Home
Is Where The Heart Is Not

1956:
University City, Missouri

There's always one of these kids at
every school playground. On the
blacktop at Daniel Boone School this kid is Aaron Kantro. He's the one with the "Kick Me"
sign scotch -taped to his back. He
knows people are laughing at him. His temper ratchets up like beans in a
pressure cooker. He'd better get
control of that rage, stuff it back
inside himself. He gets into trouble
when the rage comes out. He does crazy
things that have big consequences. He
knows what the word means. He's endured
plenty of Consequences. They aren't
funny, like on the TV show, "Truth Or Consequences". He's learning the trick: he's learning to
put his feelings into a steel safe with ten combinations and gleaming chrome
wheels that turn smoothly. He's
learning to lock away his feelings.
They're dangerous.

In baseball season, football season,
soccer season, it's always the same: Aaron stands in line when the team
captains chose their players. He waits
slightly pigeon-toed, his shoulders held high and his hands fisted tightly at
his sides. At school he can't compete
with boys his own age, so he has been put back a year in gym class. It doesn't help. They might as well have put him back with the first graders. He is too little to hurt anyone. If he punches a bully in the nose the force
is no more than a gnat landing on its six tiny legs. There's no power in Aaron's body. He barely weighs seventy pounds.
He's uncoordinated. He isn’t
obnoxious or funny. Without these
ingredients for childhood charisma, his place in the playground pecking order
is at the bottom. Last. "Kick Me" dangles from the back of
his shirt on an inch of Scotch Tape just below the collar.

Aaron isn't afraid of these
jerks. The person he fears is his
mother. He's terrified of his mother.

The dark shadows under Aaron’s eyes
give the impression that his soul is etched with some serious concern. His thoughtful demeanor earns him a
nickname. He is called “The Professor”. It's not a happy nickname. It isn’t like “Slugger”, “Speedy” or
“A.J”. One of Aaron’s teachers started
using it as a term of affection. The
kids adopt it as their expression of contempt.
When they drawl “Here comes the Professor” they use a throaty mocking
tone that is the currency of sarcasm and insult. They draw things on sheets of paper. "Place Foot Here" with an arrow pointing towards his
behind. They've drawn Aaron with a yarmulke and a tallis. He's on his knees crawling after a pig. Lock away that temper. Put it in the big black safe.

His mother says she wants to kill
him. She says it often. Aaron wonders what it's like to be
executed. What's it like to know that
you have one minute to live? Count
down: sixty, fifty nine, fifty eight.
He would spend his last minute praying, he decides, but not to the
Jewish God. He thinks there's a God but
He lives at the center of the universe, far far away. Jewish god, Catholic god, Methodist god. That's just stupid. People invented religions so they can stick
"Kick Me" signs on each other's backs. Aaron feels in his heart that there is a great and beautiful god
because birds sing beautiful songs.
Because the night sky is majestic and sometimes meteors whizz down from
deep space. Because the lowliest bug
has patterns on its body that only a genius can design. He thinks of God when he crosses the
Mississippi River over McKinley Bridge.
He looks down at that huge powerful thing and knows that only God can
make something like that.

At school, he spends most of his time
lost in fantasies, looking out the window with unfocused eyes. Through the day he dreams heroic myths. He is enraptured by Vikings. In his fantasy
he is the leader of a crew of sea raiders.
They charge castle walls, wearing helmets adorned with ox horns. Inside the castle is a pretty blonde
princess who waits to be rescued by Aaron The Strong.

He always delays going home. His mother's usually at home. He is completely terrified of his mother.

Aaron’s
school is two blocks from the modest house on Parkway Court. Aaron has explored alternate routes. He walks around Greenwood Park, up to the
railroad tracks, then across the bridge.
He slides down the embankment and takes the foot bridge that leads
through back yards onto Ruth Street.
Another back yard path leads to the bottom of his street, which is
called a "court", where the houses form a closed semi-circle. Number 8024 is halfway up the eastern side
of Parkway Court, which is one of a twenty four street subdivision. None of the houses are more than five years
old. A sapling is planted in front of
each house. It will be twenty years
before they provide shade.

If he's lucky, his brother and sisters
are home or his mom has gone shopping. He grabs a snack and then slides like a
ghost through his siblings' cries and demands and gets into the room he shares
with his little brother. Avoiding his
mother’s attention is the highest priority.
Little currents of fear race along his nerves when he thinks of Esther
Kantro.

Aaron has a friend named Jeffrey
Rubin, who lives five houses up the street.
When he goes to Jeffrey's house the atmosphere is so different that he
can barely understand it. Jeffrey’s mom
cracks bad jokes, makes cookies and tries to hug and kiss her wriggling son as
he pretends to try to escape. Things
aren't tight and quiet at Jeffrey's house, things move along in a way that's
actually fun.

The attraction isn't really Jeffrey,
whose mind seems to move at about half the speed of Aaron's mind. The attraction is a home that isn't one
continuous scream of terror.

Aaron’s mother frequently says, as if
to excuse her rages, "I love you the only way I can." He doesn’t understand what that means. He's sure his mother does not love him. She hates him! When she says she loves him “the only way-I can”, that must mean
there is something wrong with him.

Aaron is certain of his father’s
love. He wants to see his dad, wants
dad to be at home all the time, wants dad to talk to him, ask him questions
about what he's thinking. He wants his
dad to understand that he isn’t stupid, he's just…just too mad to think,
maybe. He wants dad to tell him things
are okay. He isn’t afraid of his
dad. Maybe love is just not being
afraid. When his father's home, Esther
is a different person. She doesn't
shake him or scream at him, she doesn't squeeze his arms until fingernail marks
show.

More than anything, Aaron wants his
father to be at home.

Aaron can’t have what he wants. Aaron is getting used to this state of being
denied what he wants. It seems like
it's always his mother who blocks him, taking away the things he wants.

It's a secret, this fighting that
takes place when his father is away.

Esther makes threats. “I’ll kill you if your father hears of
this”, she says one day. "I'm sick
of it! I'm sick of you! You drive me crazy!"
She is twisting a wet dish towel in her rough red hands. Aaron sees his neck between those
hands. He is seeing the thoughts in
Esther’s mind.

While Aaron tries to banish this
image, his mother enters her ongoing tirade.
In some abstract way Aaron knows that his mother isn't really speaking
to HIM, she is speaking to something or someone that made her angry a long time
ago. “How did the toaster get knocked
to the floor? It’s broken into a
million pieces! How did that
happen? How? HOW? Your dad better not find out about
this! I have to throw away the toaster
and buy another one. I’m so mad I can kill you! I'm sick of you, I am, totally sick of you and your tricks and
your behavior. Dad has enough on his
mind. He works all day and half the
night, and he doesn’t need stories about you, running around the house flying
like an airplane, knocking things down right and left. You’ll give your father a heart attack! You're going to kill him!” Her voice rises in pitch and volume. “He’ll drop dead and it’ll be your
fault! Is that what you want? Is it?”

The word "kill" is as common
as pennies in the currency of the Kantro's domestic language. Killing, murder, suicide, death death
death....the siblings scream at each other, "I'll kill you," and
"no you won't, I'll kill you first!"

. Sometimes
Aaron slaps his hands to his ears. No
no no no! His father can’t die! He won’t tell, won’t utter a word about this
strange …strange…situation. That's a
good word. It's a situation. For Aaron this is a new way of using a
familiar word.. He likes to discover
new words and new ways to use words. It
is one of those pleasures that comes from inside his mind. This is a way of thinking that he
enjoys. It's the USE of his mind that
he enjoys. He loves finding new words
and learning how to use them.

Aaron will protect his father at all
costs from this...situation. It isn’t
dad’s fault he has to work so much.
Mother always says it: money’s more important than anything, even love!

It isn’t dad’s fault that he goes to
work so early and comes back so late.
It isn’t dad’s fault that Aaron gets so mad he breaks dishes and never
does his homework and threw a baseball through the living room window.

The problem is that without dad at
home, mother does anything she wants.
It depends on the way she feels.
She makes him stay for hours in the dark closet with the door
closed. He curls up into a ball and
listens to her talk. Her voice is
louder and then softer as she moves about the house. She tells him what he is and doesn't spare the curse words. He's stupid, lazy, ugly, a disappointment, a
worthless no good son of a bitch and it would have been better if he hadn't
been born.

Sometimes Aaron’s mom feels bad and
sometimes she feels good but it's spooky good, there's something wrong with how
she feels good. She dances by herself
around the living room, singing corny old songs, and then she puts on her mink
coat and drives to the stores in Clayton and Lake Forest. When she comes home she moves so fast she
looks like two people at once while she hides the stuff she bought. She moves the heavy coats aside and gets
into the deep shelves at the back of the closet. She pushes at bags and boxes until she makes room for the new
shoes, earrings and bracelets.

She buys a lot of stuff and Aaron
wonders if she is the reason why dad works all the time. Dad is scared of her, Aaron realizes. He lets her do whatever she wants rather
than start one of those terrible fights where screams get so loud the neighbors
call the police and mom hits dad so hard his eyes go black. Those fights terrify Aaron.

Aaron doesn'’t blame his father. It's just bad luck. He has a vague knowledge that his mother
hasn't always been this way. She was
different when she and dad were first married.
She looks different in the pictures.
She looks happy and..and...nice!

What has happened to change her from a
nice person to such a mean person?

---------------------------------------------------------

By late September school has already become boring. Aaron doesn't have the attention span to
hold on to subjects that aren't related to his interests. Numbers, chemicals, categories, all these
things whoosh past him without leaving an impression.

Then,
on the last day of the month, a notice appears on the main board just outside
the principal's office. It has symbols
that Aaron recognizes as musical notes and a floaty cartoon of several men in
top hats and tuxedos, tootling on various instruments.

MUSIC APPRECIATION. An elective course available to fourth
graders begins in two weeks. Those who
are interested should sign their names on the numbered sheet attached. A pencil dangles from a string. This IS interesting and promises to break
the daily monotony of teachers' droning voices. Aaron picks up the bright orange nub and signs his name.

He waits eagerly. After the passage of two weeks, his home
room teacher hands out a number of folded notices. One of them is for Aaron and he finds notification that today, yes,
TODAY! At one thirty the kids who signed up for the class are to go to the
cafeteria.

One thirty comes and Aaron is in the
biology lab with Mr. Warren, the science teacher. He presents his note. The
teacher scans it and nods Aaron towards the door.

Aaron finds himself traversing the
near-empty halls towards the cafeteria.
A few kids converge on the double glass doors leading into the expanse
of the lunch facility. They push the
doors open and find an area where the long rectangular tables have been cleared
away to make room for a chalk board, an upright piano and three rows of chairs.

The students find their seats with the
usual clamor. After getting a glance at
the teacher, kids are bumping one another to sit in the back row. They've done their lightning appraisal of
the instructor and they don't like what they see: the music teacher looks
mean.

It seems pretty stupid to Aaron to try
and get away from this strange looking woman.
He takes a seat in the front row at the right corner, next to the
window. He counts the attendees: eleven
students. Eleven out of a total of
ninety seven fourth graders at Daniel Boone School. Of those eleven, Aaron guesses with accurate realism, there might
be four who are actually interested in Music Appreciation.

The two minute bell rings before third
period. Wooden floorboards in the halls
amplify chatter and the sounds of hurrying feet. The staccato booming quickly dies as classroom doors close behind
tardy students.

The teacher stands next to the
blackboard with one hand on her hip, the other holding a long piece of chalk
that she passes through her fingers with intricate dexterity. It twirls from thumb and index finger down
to the middle finger, where it stops and whizzes around that long digit and
somehow balances on its point in the teacher's palm. The chalk then continues and finds its way to the pinky and
returns the way it has come. The
teacher's fingers look like five perfectly trained snakes.

Aaron is transfixed by this skilful
movement. Under his desk he attempts to
work the pattern with his pencil, which he instantly drops and just as
instantly picks up.

The kids are wary. A couple of girls whisper the word
“ugly”. Aaron looks at the new teacher
and tries the word ugly, but it doesn’t fit.
He rummages his mind for a word to describe the woman. Not ugly.
Not scary. Not mean. Not repulsive.

Then the word comes to him. It's a word he doesn't know he knew, but
somehow he knows what it means. Maybe
he read it in David Copperfield.

The word is Homely.

The teacher is homely. Her hair is in a net. Its red brown coils are tucked in an orderly
bun. She has large ears. She wears a green blouse and a pink sweater
that covers a long bony torso. The
sweater is too short at the waist and buttoned to the top over her large adam’s
apple. The long brown skirt looks as if
it was made a hundred years ago. There
are a pair of checked men’s pajama pants visible beneath the hem of the skirt. The grey and green flannel pants swish over
white tennis shoes as she walks.

“Take your seats, take your seats,”
the woman says in voice that's more like song than like speach. When the students sort themselves out, the
teacher begins to write her name on the blackboard with brisk muscular strokes.

“I am,” she says as she taps the chalk
rapidly on the board. Tap tap. Tap tap tap. There is a pause as she finishes printing her name. “I am….Mrs. Leek.”

There's an immediate titter throughout
the class. Aaron agrees it's a funny
name but feels that it will be rude to laugh at another person's name.

Mrs. Leek turns and puts her hands on
her hips. The laughter diminishes but
doesn't die out. Mrs. Leek looks at the
students as if she can stab them with her eyes. Only one boy continues laughing.
He's a big dumb kid named Bennie Shapiro. His eyes are closed and his head points towards the ceiling as he
brays like a donkey.

“YOU!” The woman points to Benny Shapiro. She is holding the white chalk as if it can beam death-rays. “Do you think there’s something funny about
my name?”

Benny’s face comes down and turns
almost crimson. His long legs are
splayed out beneath the chair in front of him, his shoes almost pointing in
opposite directions. “Ummm,”
Benny murmurs, “I was just, uh…”

“And your name is?” The teacher demands. She takes a small pad of paper from her
skirt pocket and holds a pen over it.

Benny is stunned into silence.

“Can someone tell me this young man’s
name?”

“Bennie Shapiro” emerges timidly from several children.

Mrs. Leek writes quickly on her pad,
tears the leaf free and walks to Bennie Shapiro. She folds the paper once and hands it to the boy. “You are dismissed from this class, Mister
Shapiro. Permanently. I don’t tolerate rudeness. Take this note to your teacher. I’m informing her of why you are no longer
in this class. I’ll want her signature,
and a signature from one of your parents.”

Bennie is confused and scared. He pulls his legs back under him and gets
up. He looks around, appealing to his
classmates. None meet his eyes.

Discipline problems are thus ended in
Music Appreciation Class.

Aaron has never encountered a person
so strange as Mrs. Leek. She sings
rather than speaks. When kids are
outside her danger radius, she is a ripe target for mockery. Everywhere in the school some piping voice
imitates her trademark delivery.

“Students!”, they sing, “Who can tell
me the name of this music?
Students! What instrument do you
hear in this solo?” After two weeks the kids shave the imitation to a lilting
utterance of the single word in two notes: Students! They become like bird calls, emitting from the playground,
answered from the second floor, again from the gym. “Students!”, they sing, and follow with fits of giggling.

Mrs. Leek doesn’t care. She is terrifying. This capacity to instill fear is a combination of her stunning
dour face and the expressions of contempt she can use to bore straight through
a student’s soul. Her lips are
extremely full and marked with cracked vertical lines. Her skin has the texture of pitted leather. Sometimes her face looks like a tree knot, a
place where a branch has failed to sprout.

Her teaching methods are strict and
direct. She doesn't mind getting wrong
answers. At least they are
answers. One day she points a yardstick
at a boy named Mark Rabinowitz.

“Can you tell me, Mister Rabinowitz,
what German composer struggled with deafness throughout his life?”

Mrs. Leek pops the yardstick across a
desktop, making it snap so loud everyone jumps.

“All I want to know is whether or not
you are alive!” the woman says. “I’m
not asking so much. Make a guess, take
a chance. You can’t look more stupid
than you do now. ‘Duh, um, Fats
Domino?,’”she mocks. “Beethoven’s
Balls, most of you kids are stupid as fire hydrants.”

Mrs. Leek’s curse has brought all the
students to a state of fascinated alertness.

“I suppose I’ll get fired now,” she
says calmly. “I’ll only miss two or
three of you.”

Her
eyes meet Aaron’s and she gives him the slightest wink. Aaron’s insides relax with unfamiliar
gratitude as he realizes that he will be one of those few students.

The incident passes and the eccentric
teacher does not get fired. She
continues the arduous task of instilling music into the lives of her students.

She brings record albums from her
collection. One day she brings 45’s by
Fabian and Elvis. She plays them side
by side with old records by Mississippi blues men with funny names. Blind Willy this. Pegleg Joe that.

“You see how the rhythms and chords
are really the same?” she asks. Two or
three sets of eyes are alert. Aaron
Kantro nods but is too paralyzed with shyness to speak.

When the teacher plays Benny Goodman
or Duke Ellington, Aaron feels like he is on a rocket ship. He thinks a fuse has been lit under his
chair. The music gives him goose
bumps. He feels a strange warmth at the
back of his neck.

One day Mrs. Leek brings an album in a
sleeve painted in wild abstract colors.

“Students!” she says in her two-note
fanfare. “Without further ado, I bring
you ‘The Prelude To The Rite of Spring’, by Igor Stravinsky. For all of you eggheads, it's played by the
New York Philarmonic and conducted by Leonard Bernstein.”

She puts the 33 rpm record on the
spindle of the school’s little blue Zenith record player. She turns the knob and the record drops to
the turntable. The tone arm
automatically lifts and positions itself over the rim of the album. It drops onto the vinyl surface and there
are a few seconds of crackling static before the music begins.

An instrument plays, solo. Maybe it's an oboe, or a bassoon. It seems to Aaron as if it's calling someone
or something, maybe a bird in the forest.
Soon its call is answered by another bird, and another. The music gathers power, momentum, and
starts battering itself like a pair of huge mountain rams clashing horn to
horn.

Nine kids put their hands over their
ears, slump, jerk, make pig faces. Mrs.
Leek tolerates this behavior. She knows
she is asking a lot.

One child, Aaron, is transfixed. His eyes go soft and distant.

Mrs. Leek lets the music play for
three or four minutes, then gently turns down the volume until it is
silent. Taking care not to call Aaron
“Professor”, she asks him what he thinks of the music.

Aaron is aware of the other students
watching. He thinks it best to shrug
and say nothing. He fits in better when
he pretends to be stupid.

From the first day of class, Aaron has
felt Mrs. Leek's attention. He can tell
that she knows something about him, and that she likes him. She does nothing to single him out, nothing
to embarrass him. He will never admit
it to other kids, but he likes her. Now
he is overcome by his need to share his feelings with the teacher. She is homely, but Aaron sees a kindness in
her face that makes the homeliness vanish.

"It sounds so weird!”, Aaron
says... “I can see, like, giant birds calling and dragons dancing, and planets
moving through space. There are spooky
vines and flowers growing really fast and then when it got loud and, um,
rhythmic I, ”…he pauses, looks around the room, and his voice tapers away in
embarrassment.

Mrs. Leek's gaze penetrates him
thoughtfully. Again, she restrains
herself from calling him “Professor”.
It is such a perfect nickname for the precocious little boy.

"That’s good, Aaron,” is all she
says. “That’s very good."

Mrs. Leek enters Aaron’s name as a
candidate for the Comprehensive Musical Aptitude Test. This search for young talent emerges from
The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and its bundle of civic programs. The test to discover promising musicians
between eight and ten years old is the obsession of Saul Lefkowitz, first
violinist and Concert Master of the orchestra.
The distinguished violinist has made careers blossom through the decades
of his life. He is adept at finding
grant money and has kept the Youth Orchestra thriving for more than twenty
years.

, Mrs. Leek is supposed to give Aaron a
note to be signed by his parents, a simple consent form. She signs it herself, forging the signature
of Aaron’s father, and sends it on.
There is something wrong in Aaron’s family. She doesn’t have to be a genius to know this. Her experience has taught her that talent
often emerges from trouble. She isn’t
taking any chances. She knows that this
child, this thin sad-looking child, has a real passion for music. He has been born with the soul of an artist.

A few days later Mrs. Leek hands
Aaron a precious invitation with its
date, time and address. The conspiracy
is unspoken. Aaron knows he has been
granted a favor. He doesn't want his
mother to know about the test. She will
tell him he can't go, and she will scream at his dad until he gives in. He knows that if something good comes of
this test, he will have to fight for its possession. His mother ALWAYS says no.
He has given up asking for things.
He lives an alternate life, completely beyond the ken of his
family. He has become a precocious
virtuoso of bus, streetcar and other forms of transportation. He does everything in his power to avoid
going home. He spends late afternoons
watching the fifty cent double feature at the Varsity Theatre.

On a Saturday morning in early
October, the chosen students are allowed into the presence of the maestro.

The big dark auditorium swallows the
fifty children. They sit in the first
rows, just below the stage. They can
see into the mysterious empty orchestra pit.
The stage and front rows are lit.
The rest of the vast chamber is in darkness.

Saul Lefkowitz sits dangling his legs
from the polished teak stage, holding a violin in his left hand, idly touching
a string with his pinky finger.

The concertmaster is a short bald man
with a plump torso and eyebrows that fly upward like flames from his bright
blue eyes. He is a familiar type. Aaron dismisses him as completely
unremarkable. He reminds him of his
uncle Morris, the one who farts so much that it isn't funny any more.

When the children are seated and
quiet, Saul Lefkowitz picks up a bow, puts the violin to his neck and begins
playing with incredible agility and fire.
He is completely transformed!
His body rocks like that of an Orthodox Jew in prayer, his elbow slicing
the air, the bow riding across the strings, bouncing into the air, then
skipping like flat stones thrown across water.
All of this motion unleashes a cascade of precise yet passionate musical
sound. Aaron has never seen anyone who
possesses this magic, this amazing skill!

Aaron Kantro promises himself that
some day, he too will have this intangible thing, this Genius. He doesn't care how hard it will be, how
much work it requires, how much time, how much sacrifice.

Having gotten the attention of the
aspiring musicians, Saul Lefkowitz has a bundle of sheets passed around and
begins to administer The Test.

An hour later, the violinist snaps his
case shut, unplugs the tape recorders, the tone generators, and stuffs the
envelope of tests into his briefcase.

"Thank you very much,
children. It will take a couple weeks
to process these scores. You will be
notified if you qualify for a place in the Youth Orchestra. I'm sure you all did very well and I wish
there was room for every one of you in the orchestra. Fech! It can’t be. I will tell you now that perhaps five of
you, at the most, will qualify. So I’m
just asking you not to get your hopes up.
And most of all, just because you don’t get a place in the Youth
Orchestra doesn’t mean you should give up an interest in music. If you already play an instrument, keep
practicing! And those of you who don’t,
find an instrument you enjoy, get a teacher and learn music! It’s wonderful!"

Aaron finds the test stimulating but
not difficult. Which chord is identical
to the preceding chord? A, B, C, or
D? It's effortless. Aaron knows the answers.

Aaron quickly marks his test
sheet. He notices a boy in the row
ahead of him who is his equal in speed.
The boy is relaxed and marks his test sheet with nonchalance. As Aaron emerges from the auditorium into
the light of an autumn afternoon, this boy approaches him, open and confident.

"Hi, my name is Lester
Stiers. I'll bet you did pretty
good. I was watching, I can tell. I already know about chords and intervals,
my dad taught me. I’m lucky, my dad's a
really good musician."

Aaron isn't used to friendliness. He blushes, and fights an impulse to turn
away. He forces himself to respond.

"I'll bet you did pretty good
yourself. What instrument do you want
to play?"

Aaron makes a sleepy-eyed face and
pretends to hold a big saxophone sideways.
"Doo ta dooo ta doo", he tries to imitate one of The Prez'
licks.

Lester’s face goes slack with amazement. “Wow! We must be the
youngest hipsters in the world! I get
this all from my dad. He’s so
frustrated sometimes. To make a living
he has to play a lot of schlock, you know, Mickey Mouse, bubblegum, ticky tick,
but that’s life for a jazz musician.
Hey, what school do you go to?"

"My dad says she's nutty as a
drunken camel but she’s a bitchin' musician.
Ha ha!” Lester mouths the curse word routinely, but his giggle betrays
his nervousness. “I'm coming to your
school in January. Dad's got a gig in
Gaslight Square, and we just moved to U. City.
I’ll be in the fourth grade.
What about you?”

“Me too,” says Aaron. He hopes they will be in the same
homeroom. Aaron is desperate for a
friend, and he’s never met anyone that he likes so much, so fast.

“So…. guess I'll see you at Daniel
Boone School," Lester says breezily.
A car, driven by a woman who must be Lester’s mother, is pulling to the
curb.

Lester gets into the car. As he waves goodbye, Aaron can tell that
Lester’s mother is going to offer him a ride.
He is overcome by shyness. He
quickly disappears into the crowd and waits for the bus.

When a week has passed, Aaron takes to
racing home from school so that he has a chance to be first to the
mailbox. He has said nothing about the
test, has betrayed none of his hope.

He is filled with dread.

When the result arrives eighteen days
later, it is addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Max Kantro.

This is a complication Aaron has not
anticipated. Why didn't he think of
this? Oh, what a dummy he is! He can't open it. His mother will be the first to open it.

A hot poker of fear prods his
heart. He can't remember when or how it
began, this war with his mother, but he knows that if he likes something, if
it's fun, if it gives him a sense of skill, then he will have to fight for
it. He knows these feelings if not the
words. He has no idea why he is locked
in this contest with his mother, why it bothers her so much to see him
happy. He accepts it as one of life's
dark mysteries.

He places the mail on the end table in
the den. Then he sets himself to
wait. He is like a statue. He has no attention for television, for
books. He is preparing for battle.

Esther comes whistling into the house
two hours later, arms full of packages.
Aaron knows by the whistle and the packages that his mother is
"up". This isn’t good. He’d rather face her “down” than her “up”.
When she's "down" she is mindlessly brutal. When she is "up" she is unpredictable. She is capable of anything. She's devious. This is a word he has looked
up in the dictionary. “Devious:
departing from the proper or accepted way.
Not straightforward. Deceptive
or crooked.”

Esther glances at her son, whose eyes
are pointed at the television. Aaron
recognizes an episode of Sky King, but it is nothing to him but moving figures
and noise.

"Hello, Aaron."

"Hi," Aaron mumbles, seeing
nothing.

Esther Kantro drops the packages on
the couch and hangs her coat in the closet.
She is dark-haired, dark eyed, stout, powerful. Her nose is like the blade of an ax.

"Did you have a good day?"

"Yes, fine." Aaron's voice sounds as if it has no breath
behind it. When he was younger he was
wild and angry. That had been shaken
out of him. Now he is quiet. He has learned stealth, guile, even treachery. These are his weapons, his only means of
waging war.

He has put the letter in the middle of
the pile.

Esther gets organized and comes to the
table and begins going through bills, advertisements and letters. She stands over the trash can, dropping
envelopes from her hand to the grey bin.

Aaron watches her every movement from
the corner of his eye. He sees his mother
reach the distinctive grey and blue striped envelope containing the letter from
Saul Lefkowitz. She opens it and reads
it. She makes a little splutting noise with her lips, puts the paper back into
the envelope, crushes the thing into a wad and throws it after the junk mail.

Aaron's heart begins to pound with
terror. He knew this would happen! He knew it!

He will wait until she leaves the
room, he'll get the letter and show it to his dad when he comes home. That's his plan.

"Look, the trash is full,
Aaron. Why don't you take it out?"

Aaron lifts the plastic cylinder full
of trash and heads for the back door.
His mother follows him.
"Get the other cans. It's
collection day tomorrow. We'll put
everything in the trunk and take it to Shepman's so his truck doesn't wake your
dad in the morning."

Lev Shepman is the garbage man. He owns a dump on the other side of the
highway. Taking the garbage to Shepman
in his filthy grey jumpsuit is unthinkable, ridiculous.

Aaron hasn't reckoned with his mother’s
powerful psychic antennae. Is she some
kind of witch? How can she know?

She knows. She has been deceived.
Aaron has achieved something without her permission. He has lied and concealed things. That means Aaron wants something very
badly. Esther is aggrieved; she
radiates outrage, but says nothing. She
will simply eradicate the letter before Max comes home. She can tear it to pieces but that's too
simple. She wants Aaron to participate
in its loss. She wants him to know that
his desires are nothing to her but garbage.

Briefly, mother's and son's eyes
meet. Aaron turns away, lest she see
his hate and his desire.

Esther follows Aaron from room to room
as he gathers the trash and puts it into a big plastic bag. His heart beats painfully against his rib
cage, like mallet blows on some tympani of foreboding.

When everything is collected, Esther,
dangling her keys, escorts Aaron towards the car.

He has to do it, now. Hefting the sack on his scrawny shoulder he
lurches down the driveway, dodges a car, cuts through the neighbors' garden,
squeezes through a hedge, and is gone.
The sack is heavy with melon rinds, leftovers gone too ripe,
newspapers and an old phone book. As he adjusts the clumsy weight of the sack,
Aaron hears a muffled squawk of outrage from his mother. He knows she's too fat to run. He makes it down into The Dell, a tiny copse
of wood and water that has yet to fall under the developers' tractors.

Terrified and exultant, he finds the
letter near the top of the heap, straightens it and reads it by the fading
light.

"Dear Mr. and Mrs. Kantro,” it
says. "It gives me great pleasure
to inform you that your son, Aaron, achieved one of the highest scores for
musical aptitude in the history of the Comprehensive Musical Aptitude
Test. In the entire state, among
thousands of children, Aaron ranks in the upper one tenth of a percentile. I strongly encourage you to enroll your son
in the Youth Orchestra. We have
openings at present for violin, flute, bassoon, trumpet and percussion. With his enrollment comes instruction in his
chosen instrument, free of charge. In
the future, should Aaron express a desire, he will be given training in
Harmony, Theory and advanced musical forms.
This is thanks to the Zellman Endowment, whose funds have been set aside
to encourage those students with special promise. Please fill out and sign the enclosed form and return it to me in
the provided envelope. I look forward
to hearing from you. Sincerely, Saul
Lefkowitz, Concertmaster, St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. "

The letter is crumpled, damp and
stained with coffee grounds. Aaron
looks at the form, a questionnaire with check boxes and signature lines. He studies it carefully, then sponges the
sheets dry on his shirt and folds them.
Aaron hugs the letter to his chest.
He laughs hugely and silently and dances in a little hopping circle,
throwing his arms to the sky, showing the letter to the gods in Heaven. Nothing like this has ever happened to
him. He has never been praised, never
succeeded, never been special.

Now he is someone! Upper one tenth of a percentile! That means he is better than ninety nine
point nine percent of all the other fourth graders in the state. Oh God!
An area in him is opening up, a place, a scent, a taste, a way of being
that he has never known. Victory!

It is dark. There is an owl that lives in The Dell. It hoots, a familiar and beloved tone. To Aaron the sound means autumn.
It means Halloween, burning leaves, Thanksgiving. It brings the spirit of the Indians to his
imagination. They are laden with
pumpkins and sheaves of corn. Something
about this time of year shivers his very core with a thrill of olden days, of
uncut forests and great running rivers.

Once, as he was playing Army with the
other kids, the owl took a giant white crap right on his head. He didn't take it personally. He loves the owl, and wonders where it will
go when the tractors come.

He still has to go home, to face his
mother's wrath, his father's weakness.
He isn't in the Youth Orchestra yet.
He has pushed defiance to a new level.
He knows, from bitter experience, that his mother will make him pay.

Through the trees he can see the
lights coming on. He can hear the cars
of fathers coming home from work, and knows that his father is still some hours
away. He waits, trying to re-read the
letter, but it's now too dark.

At last, seizing his courage as if it
is a brick and he a workman, he starts home, with the letter and consent form
folded neatly in his pocket. He emerges
from the trees into the suburban night.
Cicadas buzz and the ghostly glow of television light escapes from
curtained windows. When he gets to the
next-door neighbors’ garden, he sees with great relief that his father's car is
in the driveway.

His parents are in the den, watching
television. Max has his supper on a
portable tray. None of Aaron's siblings
are present.

As the boy lets himself in the back
door, Esther is silent.

"Where on earth have you
been?" Max Kantro is concerned but
not angry. Aaron is never frightened of his father. He advances, avoiding his mother's glare,
and holds out the letter.

"Mom threw this in the
trash. I had to get it back."

"What are you talking about?”
Esther protests. “There is only junk
mail. I threw nothing......"

Max sees his son cringe away from his
wife, and it hurts, but he doesn't know what to do. He takes the letter. He
wants to give the boy a big hug, but that isn't his way, has never been the way
in his family. They don’t touch, don’t
hug.

As he reads, the wrinkles in his
face change direction. A proud blush
flows from his neck to the top of his head.
He had been exhausted. Now
there's energy in him. His poor lost
son may have found something to guide him through his difficult childhood.

"Look at this, Esther. How can
this happen? He scored in the upper tenth percent. My god, this is fantastic.
Aren't you looking, Esther? I've
heard about these tests from everybody down at the deli. It's become the big status thing, to get
your kid into the Youth Orchestra. It’s
a scholarship! Aaron, why didn't you
say something? I didn't even know you
took the test."

Esther sits with her shoulders rigid,
her nose wrinkled. “Let me
see." Max hands the letter to his
wife. Aaron blanches, imagining that
she is about to tear the missive to pieces.

Esther's expression remains fixed as
she reads the letter. "That's very
good, Aaron. We're very proud of
you." She hands the letter
daintily back to her husband, holding it with the tips of her fingers. "Music....hmm..uh huh." She says the word "music" as if it
refers to a noxious gas.

Max smiles. He seems unaware of the tangled wires that grip his wife and
son. "I can't wait to tell my
sisters. One of my customer's kids took
the test. He got a polite form
letter. Nothing."

Esther brightens as she thinks of
having something over her sisters-in-law.
Aaron knows the signs; he knows that a battle has been won.

"Have you decided on an
instrument?" Max refers to the
letter. "Look, you can......"

"Drums." Aaron makes this announcement as boldly as
he can. “See,” he points at the application sheet, “It says ‘percussion’ but
that means drums and everything about drums.”
Mrs. Leek showed the class a movie of the Count Basie orchestra, and when
Aaron saw the drummer, Sonny Payne, dashing his way through "The One
O’clock Jump,” he found a new hero, a new kind of icon, a sweaty madman at the
helm of a giant ship, a drummer-captain commanding the guns of the brass
section, summoning the torpedoes of the woodwinds, driving it, steaming ahead,
locking with the bass player in a majestic stomping wildness that thrilled
every atom of his being.

"Drums," he says, hammering
the word into the firmament like a mountain climber planting a flag.

"Well, okay," Max begins,
but Esther interrupts.

"Anything but drums, Max. That will drive me crazy. My migraines...I can't stand it.....no way
can it be drums."

Max sees a sudden bleakness ripping
away the triumph in his son's face.
Beside him, smoky thoughts waft from the crypt of Esther's mask-like
countenance. The battle that has been
proceeding between his wife and his firstborn son reveals itself in all its
frost and frustration. The naked enmity
that exists between the people he loves emerges like a buried archive from a
melted avalanche. He understands
suddenly that he is in a delicate situation.

"Aaron," he says, knowing
that this will be a huge disappointment for his son. "Choose another instrument.
Your mother's only being fair.
She has it rough with her headaches.
Maybe in a few years, maybe her headaches will get better...." his
eyes plead back at his son's pleading.

Something rippes and gives way, and
Aaron accepts his lot. He has
anticipated as much. It can never
happen, that he will get what he really wants.
It will always be the consolation prize.

"Can I play trumpet?" he asks, timidly. "I want to play jazz, like Satchmo and
Dizzy."

Where on earth is a nine year old
getting this stuff? Max looks toward
Esther, and sees an objection perched on the edge of her lips.

"Listen to that," Esther
says, her spite gaining momentum.
"He wants to play Schvahtze music.
Not respectable music, not Lawrence Welk or Mantovani. He has to be a bum and go around with the
coloreds. What kind of life will that
be? Imagine me having to say to my
friends, ‘My son, the jazz musician'.
He’ll bring schvahtzes right here, into this house. He’ll be nothing but a bum and a dope
fiend. He'll end up like Mark Holtzman,
playing bar mitzvahs and weddings with a bottle of gin in his pocket, nothing
but a schlepper."

"Esther, for Christ's sake he's
nine years old! He's not making a
career choice."

"All right, then, but if I have
migraines, he'll have to go out to the garage or down in the basement. And there will be no schvahtzes in this
house except Etta and the lawn mower boy when he needs to use the spare
bathroom."

"Let him play the trumpet,
Esther, it'll be good for him. God
knows he' s no athlete and not much of a student."

Max knows all about Esther’s racial
views. She hates coloreds, she hates
all Goyim, and she is a self-hating anti-semite. She has a special terror of schvahtzes, as they are called in the
local Yiddish dialect. As a child she
witnessed a robbery, she saw her father shoot a black man. It is one of many searing memories from her
childhood. The things she doesn't
remember, or half-remembers, are far more disturbing.

Aaron sags, limp with relief. The battle, for now, is over. He has gotten something, something big. He will be in the Youth Orchestra.